kottke.org posts about Amit Gupta

A dronie is a video selfie taken with a drone. I featured Amit Gupta's beautiful dronie yesterday:

Other people have since taken dronies of their own and the idea seems like it's on the cusp of becoming a thing. Here's one taken by Joshua Works of him and his family on the shore of a lake in Nevada:

The Works clan sold most of their worldly possessions in 2011 and has been travelling the US in an Airstream ever since, logging more than 75,000 miles so far.

Adam Lisagor took this dronie of him and fellow drone enthusiast Alex Cornell standing on the roof of a building in LA:

There's a reason that you're going to see a lot of these from drone flyers like me, and it's this: once you get past the novelty of taking a camera high up in the air, getting a bird's eye view of stuff is actually a little boring.

What birds see is actually a little boring. Humans are interesting. Getting close to stuff is interesting. I bet if we could strap tiny cameras to bird heads, most of what we'd want to look at would happen when they fly close to people. If we could, we'd put cameras on bird heads to take pictures of ourselves.

The company that Amit runs, Photojojo, is going to start doing rentals soon, including kits for drone photography. And they're gonna do flying lessons as well. For now, there's a tutorial on the page about how to make "the perfect dronie". (thx to everyone who sent in videos)

For the past couple of months, Amit Gupta has been playing around with taking moving self-portraits with a camera mounted on a drone. Here's an early effort. This past weekend, Amit's efforts crossed over into the realm of art. This is beautiful:

In the comments at Vimeo, Alex Dao dubbed this type of photograph a "dronie". We'll see if that catches on.

Internet sensation Amit Gupta was recently diagnosed with leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant. Problem is that he needs a transplant from someone of South Asian descent.

To aid him in his fight, Amit is going to need a bone marrow transfusion. Unlike blood transfusions, finding a genetic match for bone marrow that his body will accept is no easy task. The national bone marrow registry has 9.5 million records on file, yet the chances of someone from South Asian descent of finding a match are only 1 in 20,000.

This is where we come in. We're going to destroy those odds.

How? By finding and registering as many people of South Asian descent as we possibly can.

Tests are easy -- a simple swab of the cheek. If someone is determined to be a match, that person would have to be willing to undergo an outpatient procedure in which marrow is extracted from bones in the back by a special needle. It's not a fun procedure, but it's not dangerous either. And doing it could save a life.